We still can’t offer a recommendation for Ice Cool in this category, but if there was a dexterity game we thought could be fun for those with physical accessibility needs it would be this one. Socioeconomic Accessibility That said it also doesn’t necessarily translate into visual inaccessibility – not in this specific case. For this, it depends very much on what you want to get out of the game. If the Catcher at any point during his turn touches one or more Runners, he takes away their ID cards.

Ice Cool 2 is a standalone expansion, meaning you can play the expansion without needing the base game (although its way better if you do have the base game, more on that later). The components in Ice Cool 2 are nearly identical to the original. There are 4 penguins and matching fish in different colors from the original. The cards have gotten a bit of an upgrade with the addition of tasks on the 1 value cards. A player can also use two value 2 cards to move any fish to a new doorway. The box setup is also very similar, being a mirrored version of the original. Finally, the rulebook has gotten a bit of an upgrade and is much clearer now. The artwork on the game boxes is also expertly done. The school-house has a lot of nice, thematic touches to really help to bring the theme home. The ID cards are also dual sided, with a male or female avatar on each side. The VP cards come in denominations of 1, 2 or 3 and depict increasingly larger plates of fish. Even the box is a work of genius. Brian Gomez and Brain Games have designed a ‘boxes-within-boxes’ creation – the various rooms that help construct the icy arena all sit snug within each other in the main box. Each one is a few millimetres narrower than its predecessor, so they sit like Russian dolls. Rooms are clipped together on your table with wooden fish pegs, which is a neat touch. It quite literally is a big game in a modest-sized box (and it can be combined with ICE COOL 2 to make a humongous layout).If you want the penguin to move in a straight line, put your finger in front of it and make a push on the very center - it will move in a straight line. The hall monitor wants to catch the students by bashing into their penguins. Should you succeed, you take their hall pass, and should you get all the hall passes then the round ends. Fish and hall passes are all traded for scoring cards which can be one, two or three points, though as a bonus, collecting a pair of one’s allows you to take an extra turn. Once everyone has been caught by the hall monitor the game ends and you count up the points on your score cards. Amy’s Final Thoughts It’s always good to have different games to the people you often play with, so Amy suggested that we buy a copy of Ice Cool and it has hit the table a few times in the last couple of weeks and sits happily among our heavy games like Terraforming Mars and A Feast for Odin. This game is very special to us as we have spent two years fine-tuning two innovative ideas. With this game we strive to do something literally “game-changing” and hopefully the innovations in this game will be a commonplace several years from now. This game is our most ambitious project so far and we are happy with the response from our international partners. Ice Cool will be launched in more than 16 countries worldwide during 2016,” says Egils Grasmanis, CEO of Brain Games Publishing. Ice Cool is a dexterity game for 2-4 players that takes about 20 minutes to play. Ice Cool plays best with 3-4 players. Game Overview:

This is the end of the review. Spend your remaining few hours before the embrace of the grave reflecting on the cold, desolate country we have forged with our collective political indifference. O Discordia.

It’s hard to know really how transferable my life experience is, so I’m going to break this review of Ice Cool up into two different parts – one for a middle aged UK audience, and one for everyone else. If you grew up in the UK during the eighties, turn to review 1. Otherwise, turn to review 2.

I encountered two problems with the combined game. On some layouts, the joins could do with a firmer hold and often there is a misalignment of doorways. The latter results in smaller openings that increase the difficulty. Neither of these are major issues. I even came to appreciate doorways of varying challenge. Every time a penguin goes through certain doorways they’ll get a fish (and take a fish card, worth varying points). Every time the hall monitor player bumps into a naughty penguin, they’ll ‘confiscate’ their hall pass, and also earn a fish card for their snitching. Boom, that’s it – you and I could sit down (or stand up) and play a game of Ice Cool right now. And we should! I mean, not right now but you know – when are you next in town? Oh, sorry – I’m actually busy then. Look, I’ll call you with the details. Haha, yes – quite. No, I’m not going to say it. Look, because… oh fine. I will slide the deets into your mentions, fam. We strongly recommend Ice Cool in both of our categories of cognitive accessibility. Emotional Accessibility More of a social experiment than a game, Sneaky Cards challenges players to complete a series of quirky, off-beat tasks: take a selfie with a stranger, hide a card in a public place, make an impassioned speech in a crowded lift. When you complete a challenge, you will pass the associated card on to someone else, who then has to attempt the task themselves. The result is an ever-growing chain of players, some of whom will have been drawn into the game completely unsuspectingly.It’s like Subbuteo, but with penguins. Or rather, it would be like Subbuteo if Subbuteo was actually fun. Innit. Also, do you guys remember Thatcher? She was a piece of work, right? Still, Theresa May – makes Thatcher look like a moderate. And remember Spitting Image? I saw a few episodes of it quite recently. It didn’t age well. Like us. Look at us. Look what has become of us. When did this happen? HOW DID WE GET SO OLD? It’s a more mentally taxing take on the original game’s premise, but unfortunately it doesn’t take long for this edition to come off the rails. The requirement to collect different cards means that you can spend several turns fishing for the ones you need before you’re actually able to do anything, and it soon becomes frustrating. Rails and Sails adds length and complexity, but it offers little new in terms of gameplay.

Well, this is an interesting gane because of how wildly it swings from ‘It gets our nod!’ to ‘Best avoid this one’. There are no intersectional considerations here that I think would make a major difference other than to say visual impairment combined with physical impairment would be enough for us to strengthen our recommendation that players avoid the game. It could perhaps be fun and playable for one or the other, but I suspect not both.

Object of the Game

The video above shows an extreme scenario of real skill. Even the effect of more modest levels of increasing ability has a corrosive impact on the game at multiple levels. Imagine one player is better than everyone else – not superb, not reliably excellent, just better. The fun everyone else has degrades in line with the skill differential. You’ll be in the line of fire more often than you’re not during Ice Cool, and your only defense is the inability of the catcher to actually hit their penguin where they want it to go. Playing with uneven skill levels here is to unbalance everything with no obvious way to fix it. It’s not that you’ll get a runaway winner – it’s that competence acts as a kind of sandpaper to everyone’s fun. It’ll wear it away until there’s nothing left at all. The components in Ice Cool are nothing short of fantastic. The biggest draw of the game has to be Brain Game’s “box in a box” system. The game board is made up of 5 boxes that link together to form the penguin school-house. The great thing about these is that the boxes nest when not in use, so the whole game fits into one normal sized game box.